Entertainment
TRADITIONAL MEXICAN BALLADEERS NOW SING ABOUT BORDER DRUG OUTLAWS
Wed, Jun 12, 2002 12:00 am
Bill Weinberg
Narcocorridos, Mexico's controversial music rage, are traditional ballads -- corridos -- glorifying the contemporary outlaws of the drug-smuggling underworld.
The form is basically unchanged since the days when corridos praised revolutionaries like Pancho Villa. These are gangsta polkas, bad-ass songs about drugs and violence in the down-home style of Mexico's northern cowboy country.
In Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns and Guerrillas (HarperCollins), Elijah Wald charges the U.S. media with ignoring a major Latin-music trend. In seeking out the roots of the narcocorrido, he visited some of the most dangerous turf of Mexico's drug wars -- like Basuchil, a remote rancho in the rugged heart of Chihuahua's pot-growing country, to interview Angel Gonzalez, whose song "Contrabando y Traición" (Smuggling and Treason), a 1972 hit for Los Tigres del Norte, defined the genre.
Revolutionary for its time, the song extols a fighting woman -- Carmelia la Tejana -- who kills her marijuana-smuggling partner when he betrays her, and takes off with the loot.
Wald calls Chalino Sanchez Mexico's Tupac Shakur. One of Chalino's shows in California in 1992 erupted into gunfire when an enemy shot at him onstage. He whipped out his own sidearm and gunned down the would-be-assassin. A few weeks later, Chalino's body was found in a Sinaloa irrigation ditch, with two bullets in the back of his head.
This proved a brilliant if Pyrrhic career move, and only fueled his popularity. Other artists relate of being kidnapped to drunken bashes and forced to perform -- or even compose corridos -- at gunpoint.
Narcocorrido provides a forgotten perspective on the War on Drugs, of ordinary Mexicans who have to grow or smuggle drugs to get ahead or even survive, and see Washington's bellicose rhetoric as a lot of hypocrisy.
As Wald quotes narcocorridista Teodoro Bello: "The gringos certify various countries/They don't want drugs to exist, they say it is a danger/Tell me, who certified the United States?"
In Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns and Guerrillas (HarperCollins), Elijah Wald charges the U.S. media with ignoring a major Latin-music trend. In seeking out the roots of the narcocorrido, he visited some of the most dangerous turf of Mexico's drug wars -- like Basuchil, a remote rancho in the rugged heart of Chihuahua's pot-growing country, to interview Angel Gonzalez, whose song "Contrabando y Traición" (Smuggling and Treason), a 1972 hit for Los Tigres del Norte, defined the genre.
Revolutionary for its time, the song extols a fighting woman -- Carmelia la Tejana -- who kills her marijuana-smuggling partner when he betrays her, and takes off with the loot.
Wald calls Chalino Sanchez Mexico's Tupac Shakur. One of Chalino's shows in California in 1992 erupted into gunfire when an enemy shot at him onstage. He whipped out his own sidearm and gunned down the would-be-assassin. A few weeks later, Chalino's body was found in a Sinaloa irrigation ditch, with two bullets in the back of his head.
This proved a brilliant if Pyrrhic career move, and only fueled his popularity. Other artists relate of being kidnapped to drunken bashes and forced to perform -- or even compose corridos -- at gunpoint.
Narcocorrido provides a forgotten perspective on the War on Drugs, of ordinary Mexicans who have to grow or smuggle drugs to get ahead or even survive, and see Washington's bellicose rhetoric as a lot of hypocrisy.
As Wald quotes narcocorridista Teodoro Bello: "The gringos certify various countries/They don't want drugs to exist, they say it is a danger/Tell me, who certified the United States?"
